Five-year-old boy finds sharp knife lying around on street

A five-year-old boy found and picked up an extremely sharp knife whilst walking home with his mum in Radlett.

Tanya McLaughlin, 24, was walking with her son, Jayden, on Orchard Close on Wednesday, October 10, when he picked up the Promitchi folding knife.

Tanya said Jayden, who never normally picks things off the ground, was walking behind her when she heard him say “I’ve found something.” She turned round to see him holding the blade.

Tanya said: “I couldn’t believe it. It’s not the kind of knife you find at home.”

While Jayden wasn’t quite shaken, he did ask his mum a number of questions about the knife.

She said: “He asked me: ‘mummy, are there bad people here?’ He was alright after, but he did ask me a couple of times if he would be in trouble for holding it and when he woke up the next morning, he asked me again if he would be so it must’ve been on his mind a bit.

“I think it was more my reaction that worried him, because as soon as I saw him holding it I said ‘No no no’ and took it off him.”

Tanya said the mugging at knifepoint that took place on Gills Hill Lane in Radlett in September had her even more on edge after finding the knife, and that she is concerned about where the knife could have come from.

She commented: “There’s a lot of knife stuff going on here, the mugging that happened and everything, it sticks on your mind and you wonder where it could’ve come from.

“But it’s not just where it came from, it could’ve ended up in the wrong hands. Older kids could’ve come across it and fought over it or decided to use it in other ways, if their head was in the wrong place… you never know these days.

“I’m just glad I came to it first.”

Tanya said she was going to hand the knife into Watford police, who recently took part in a knife amnesty across the county.

More than 200 knives were handed over to police during the amnesty last month for the Operation Sceptre campaign, which also aimed to educate young people about the dangers of carrying a knife and educate local businesses on which knives cannot be sold to anyone under 18.